July 30, 2010
Regarding my absence . . . I know. I said I’d call. Sorry. But you look great.
Call it summer doldrums as we prepare to transit through the penultimate long weekend of summer into the dog days of August.
As I have mentioned from time to time, writing nothing at all is infinitely easier than writing anything. And as you can tell, I have been taking the easy route.
The evenings have been jam-packed with sitting in the back, enjoying the garden and flowers, chatting, drinking a cold beverage and watching the wild rabbits (we have rabbits – or more accurately, they have us.)
We had visitors from out of town and Laura ran them off their feet, and apparently, hers, as she came down with a terrible summer flu shortly after their exit last Sunday and she has been miserable 24/7 ever since.
Otherwise, Chris continues to pursue personal bests on all manner of gaming platforms and Pad continues to skate and work out. He was also laid low by a fast-moving stomach bug last weekend, but he’s back to his normal state of “eating machine” now.
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I’m still going to the gym, although some days I don’t really remember the cause or purpose. But it’s better than wandering the food courts at lunch time.
It occurred to me yesterday as I punished myself on the Stairmaster for an hour that heading to the gym is a different experience for women than it is for men.
Many guys at the gym I go to will show up in an old pair of shorts and stained t-shirt from the 1997 parish pancake eating contest. There are some guys – especially the ones who frequent the spinning classes – who dress like they’re Alberto Contador showing up for the final leg of the Tour de France. But for the most part, the men’s garb ranges from community event T-shirt to maybe Under Armour that was a present from someone.
The women at the gym, on the other hand, seem to regard a visit to the gym as an opportunity to make a fashion statement.
And I’m all for that.
Among the things I’m thankful for daily are the love and health of my family, the peace and prosperity of Canada, and the person who invented Lulu Lemon, which more or less transformed a trip to the gym from a torturous experience into a prime seat on the fashion show runway with sweaty models.
Most of those models are young and fit enough to beat us old guys to a pulp, so we just sweat quietly in a forlorn corner of the gym and that seems to preserve the operational balance.
Hey. Whatever works.
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My dad celebrated a birthday this week. I won’t say how old he is, but Abraham Lincoln’s opening words to the Gettysburg Address will soon also be appropriate as an opening line of tribute to my old man.
He coached many, many hockey and ball teams over the years, and logged many miles – before they were kilometres. So, I came by some things naturally.
He is healthy and sharp and enjoys hearing the tales of our many adventures in pursuit of . . . whatever exactly it is we are pursuing these days. He also wanted to know where the blog had gone. So, here I am!
Much of what happens and is retold here comes to him as “been there, done that” but he nonetheless enjoys knowing his grandchildren and their pals are out there having fun.
Anyway, he had a great birthday and the Blue Jays had the good fortune of playing Baltimore that day, which assured a victory.
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It’s hard to imagine what the Jays’ season would be like without the Orioles.
By most standards the Jays are having a decent enough year – 53-49, with a .520 winning percentage.
But in the American League East, all that gets you is 4th place out of five teams, ahead of only – you guess it – Baltimore. The Yankees, Tampa and Red Sox make for difficult intra-divisional play and pretty much rule out even a wild card.
No other division in baseball has four teams with the collective winning percentage of these teams – 72 games above .500.
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Still with baseball . . .
So, do you think you have too much time on your hands? Well, check this out.
A researcher looking at the data from the 1961 baseball season has determined that Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris were mistakenly credited with a run scored and an RBI that year, and the official record is being changed.
The changes mean several things.
First, it means that Maris didn’t win the RBI crown for the American League that year. Instead he shares it with Baltimore’s Jim Gentile, each with 141.
Second, Mantle loses a run scored and that means the 1961 runs scored crown he shared with Maris is now Maris’s alone, with 132.
Third, it means that some guy has way, way too much time on his hands to be unearthing this stuff.
You can read all the details here.
I bet my dad does!
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Have a great long weekend. We may actually strike golf balls this weekend, the first time it has happened for me and Pad and Chris in 2010. Ironically, Laura has played more golf than us, and she doesn’t really golf. Yet.
Otherwise, because Laura is marking her 29th birthday early next week, she said she intends to spend the weekend allowing me to wait on her hand and foot.
I’m not sure how this deviates from the usual weekend routine, but I’m nonetheless happy to oblige.
Drive safe if you’re on the road.
Hug the kids.
July 22, 2010
For any Red Wing fans lurking out there, there’s an interesting piece in Macleans this week that gives a perspective on Bob Probert’s post-hockey years – years that were tragically too few.
You kind of get the impression that maybe Probert was still struggling with some of his demons, but the piece is largely positive, itemizing his devotion to his family, his interest in volunteer work and his desire to stay close to hockey.
There are fleeting allusions to rough patches after he retired and I would have liked to have read more on that to give some balance, but they’re not really explored with any tenacity.
Nonetheless, I think hockey fans will enjoy the glimpse into his life after hockey.
Click here to see it.
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Critters in the News (1)
How many cats in your house are too many cats in your house? Some might argue one is too many. But I think we can all agree that when there are almost 200 cats, well, you have a problem. Read more here.
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Jennifer Aniston has her own smell.
OK – I guess really it’s more like a fragrance.
Teamoakville’s sweetheart launched a new perfume this week, so now like the guy in the Old Spice commercials, your female significant other Can Smell Like The Woman Your Woman Could Be. Or something.
Click here.
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Critters in the News (2)
Getting through security at an airport is generally not a big deal – slow, but tolerable.
But there are things you can do to speed things up.
Like, take off all your bling – no watches, rings, or three-foot gold chains with the solid-gold replica of the Stanley Cup.
And for God’s sake, get the monkeys out of your shirt.
Yep.
Some dude in Mexico gets cuffed for trying to smuggle 18 – yes, that’s the right number – small endangered monkeys through airport security.
Honestly, just shoot the guy to speed up the paperwork.
Read more here.
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Do you like to read? Sure you do. You’re reading this.
You may not be part of it yet, but there is a revolution happening in the way people read.
A piece in the New York Times says over the last three months, sales of electronic versions of books for Amazon.com’s Kindle e-reader have overtaken sales old hardcover paper books.
And the gap is widening.
If you went to business school, professors would get very excited about explaining this as a “tipping point” in the development of e-reader technology, and they’d tell you that platforms like Kindle are a great example of a disruptive technology.
In short, over the last three months Amazon sold 143 electronic books for every 100 hardcover books.
As one Amazon exec put it: the figures are astonishing in that Amazon.com has been selling hardcover books for all of its 15 years. Electronic books have been offered for only 33 months.
You can read more here.
Electronically, of course.
If you use an e-reader, I’d appreciate it if you’d drop me a note and tell me which one you use, what you like about it, and what you don’t like. You can reach me at the usual address.
Thanks.
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More rep lacrosse officiating tonight, but otherwise fairly quiet. I think our visitors are looking forward to quiet.
Consider it a lesson learned. Smart people actually train for a couple of weeks before spending time relaxing with my wife.
July 21, 2010
I’m a big fan of moms – really, where would any of us be without ‘em?
Hockey moms, my mom, soccer moms – they’re all important.
I was wading through some back issues of Esquire at home recently and the theme of moms jumped out at me from a couple of – to me – unlikely corners of the magazine.
One of Esquire’s fun and most accessible regular features is called “What I’ve Learned” and typically it’s series of one or two sentence paragraphs from a celebrity or otherwise well-known type imparting some wit or wisdom from a full life, or at least arguably an interesting one.
The first snippet is from illusionist and weird guy David Blane, who is famous for hanging over public spaces in a glass box for weeks and other such things.
He says his mother spoiled him, though not with money or things. She spoiled him with attention, and making sure he was aware of the things he could do for free or little money – museums, libraries, parks, etc – and taking in the sights and sounds of the street life of his upbringing
It sounds like a little thing, but it impressed me as quite an insightful comment, and you can read the whole item here.
The second one came from Jon Favreau, most famous in my house for directing Elf and the Iron Man films, but also a bunch of acting roles and writing credits, too.
He lost his mother when he was 12, but he said he remembers her wild support for his creativity and all these years later – he’s 43 now – he hasn’t forgotten that. And he said remembering that kind of support was important later in life when he faced many disappointments and failures before becoming a very big deal. You can read that one here.
I just thought that was cool, and the lesson for moms and dads and coaches is obvious: you can easily lose sight of the impact you’re having on a young person’s life. Stay constructive and positive and supportive. They – we – remember it forever.
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Still with lessons learned, there was an interesting piece in the New York Times this week about how disasters are far more useful as learning experiences than successes.
If you think about it, it seems obvious, but I don’t think it is obvious, which is why so many guys my age wander around mumbling “I wish I knew what I know now, when I was younger . . .”
You live. You learn.
In the case of the NYT piece, engineers learn from disasters, like the mess in the Gulf of Mexico which isn’t getting any worse (at least the last time I checked) but it ain’t really getting any better either, and it will be a long time before BP can put the toothpaste back in this particular tube.
The general theme is that disaster leads to innovation and it cites a bunch of well-known examples, including the 1982 Ocean Ranger disaster off Newfoundland.
Please resist the urge to tell me that my life is one big learning opportunity for others, and then click here if you’re interested in the NTY item.
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I’m told Bon Jovi was a big hit. Lots of people moving more slowly around town, and my house, today, with their ears still ringing.
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Tonight is theatre night for Laura and her visiting sister – I’m in charge of entertainment on the home front, which I did a uniquely poor job in executing last night when we rented Hot Tub Time Machine, a film that contained enough salty language and inappropriate scenery to send a stevedore scrambling for cover.
Um, sorry.
Tonight – Care Bears!!
July 20, 2010
A hot sticky night at Glen Abbey last evening, watching bantam rep lacrosse where the Oakville Hawks showed Milton little hospitality en route to an 8-4 win in a non-zone exhibition game.
The game was within one or two most of the night, but Milton ran into penalty trouble over and over and you can’t play the game that way for very long.
A change of venue and temperature tonight as Pad refs three on three hockey.
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Yesterday’s posting of a link to Teamoakville fav Jen Jen solicited an email from a regular female reader who confessed to enjoying the blog, the humour and even the links.
I won’t go in to her description of what she imagines your correspondent wearing around the house, but she did make a plea on behalf of the female readership for some “eye candy” that they can call their own.
Hmmm.
This poses a bit of a challenge.
As I
pointed out to my interlocutor, Jen Jen has special status on the site –
not so much for raw objectification but for her girl-next-door
wholesomeness which puts us dads in mind of hockey moms past, present
and future, and their unflinching dedication to helping make the game
and the minor hockey experience better for the kids and the dads
especially when wearing only a necktie.
Linking to that photo of Jen Jen wearing just a necktie is for me like sitting in a Muskoka chair with a rubber ball in hand and a panting border collie at my feet. I could sit for hours and throw that ball, and every single time the collie will race off after it and then come back for more.
My loyal male readers are the collies and Jen Jen is my rubber ball. And when I toss her link, you guy run like frat boys to the bar on 10-cent beer night. It’s amusement for me in a summer that holds little diversion beyond hockey and work. (Who’s a good blog reader? WHO’S a good blog reader??? You’re a good blog reader! Aren’t you!? Aren’t you?)
PING. And away you run with your tongue flapping in the breeze like one of those flags on a car during the World Cup.
Jen Jen is a punchline to the joke that all men are predictable. Sure, I occasionally will offer up Megan Fox, but she is but a low-rent substitute for my second favourite blonde. Every guy who visits here would happily sit through a five-game tournament in Whitby, including a blow-out loss in the semis, with three trips to Boston Pizza, so long as Jen Jen is in the entourage.
And also, in spite of all that stuff I said yesterday about the community watering hole and me being the guy who keeps it tidy blah blah blah, well, I’m also the guy who gets to insert the links. And the links reflect what’s interesting to me.
And Jen Jen in a necktie and nothing else is quite interesting to me, and, according to an informal survey I conducted of blog readers, you too.
But, my interlocutor does, nonetheless, make a good point.
Informal analysis would suggest that a significant proportion of the readership here is the fairer, smarter gender. And while some of that readership may be content to stare moon-eyed at my prose and simply imagine what my 24-pack looks like rustling under my faded Oakville Lacrosse 2003 gala day t-shirt, many are looking for an overall more visually rewarding experience, and they don’t want to see Jen Jen. Or me.
I should state that the woman who poked the stick in my eye on this issue falls into the category of a “serial volunteer” – highly engaged, endlessly motivated to help out, without a doubt in the top tier of moms in our community when it comes to getting things done around a minor sports team.
I respect her immensely and because of that, her comments are taken more seriously by the executive management team at Teamoakville, where we are committed to improving the overall user experience.
So, I’m gonna go there – albeit for a worth cause.
Those of you inclined to do so can click here to see Canadian firefighter cheesecake. This link will take you to the page for the Edmonton Firefighters Burn Treatment Society, where you can look at six packs, not 24 packs, and you could actually buy a calendar that supports the children’s burn unit at the University of Alberta Hospital in Edmonton, which incidentally is where Pad was born.
So yeah. I went there. The traffic analytics crew here at Teamoakville will watch carefully to see how popular this link is compared to our second favourite 40-something blonde.
I’ll keep you posted. And you’re welcome.
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Oh – and speaking of eye candy for the fairer readers. A bonus addition, today only.
Jon Bon Jovi is playing tonight and tomorrow night at the Rogers Centre. Laura, her sister from Cape Breton, and Laura’s good pal Allison will be there tonight.
The band puts on an amazing show. Women really like to see him
I’m not waiting up.
Here’s a picture from his March 2008 concert at the ACC, where I personally arranged for him to sing Bed of Roses off stage, literally in front of Laura. I also do card tricks.
July 19, 2010
Sorry for the late posting. Distractions, distractions.
To that end, I can’t begin to tell you how many times in the last 18 months I’ve thought about winding up this blog. It’s not exactly work, but there are times when it’s a lot easier than others. And I know I'm less interesting most days than I would prefer to be!
But almost every time that thought crosses my mind, something happens to give me pause – someone shares a team photo from a big weekend, or even better, I get a private email from someone reacting to something I may have mentioned in even an offhand way.
A recent example was a reference to Pad’s peanut allergy and how alert his younger brother was to this condition. It was just a silly, slice-of-life moment in our hectic but not terribly interesting week.
But a reader out there who I don’t really know was touched by that stupid little story in a very profound way and stuff like that just makes go . . . Hmmmm.
Maybe I’ll go one more day.
Anyway, I had a moment like that again today. I won’t get into the details.
But sometimes it’s clear to me that this space is more like a community watering hole where people pass by, some more often than others, and I’m just the guy who keeps it tidy. Occasionally people will tape something to the tree, but they're more likely to just browse.
I think people come to see if hand sanitizer is still not a recommended hair product (it’s not) or whether I’m talking about my or other people’s kids (soon), and whether I’ll put up a link to Jennifer Aniston, because, well, that’s what I do. (Click here.)
People like to know that they’re not alone. They want to know that referring to your children by their birth year instead of their name is OK (“This is our 1993, I’m not sure where the ’96 is, probably in the kitchen.”) They want to know that getting excited about spending $180 on a hockey stick because it was – really – a really good deal (really), is OK??
So yeah. I’m gonna still be here I guess.
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I did a shout out recently to our pal Mike Santangeli, who made the Ontario U17 rugby team. Mike – he’s a ’93 -- and Pad were teammates in house league hockey, with Mike in goal. Atom Red champs one year, Minor PW red finalists the next. Lost in a shootout after OT. Then everyone scattered to rep.
Well, it turns out that another goalie from Pad’s past, Jack Gillis, is also on that team. Jack is something of a one-man event. Nice, nice kid; the life of the dressing room; and very big. He was a goalie with Pad on the minor bantam A, bantam AA, and minor midget AA Rangers. Oh, and Jack was the goalie on the OTHER team in that house league final shootout in minor peewee.
Anyway, they – and a third Oakville kid I don’t know, Dan Mathie – were in Nova Scotia this past weekend where all three played important roles in Team Ontario winning the Eastern Canadian Rugby Championship.
Mike used to be a fixture in our basement on Saturday morning’s after hockey. His dad was convener and Mike would come home with us to eat, hang out and play Playstation.
Jack, like I said before, is just a fun guy to be around. The year we hosted the Finns, Jack was the guy organizing and making sure there were social events, and he was the loudest guy in the building cheering for the Finns when we all went to watch their flu-ravaged lineup play.
Oakville should be proud that kids like these three are doing well on a big stage.
It says a lot about our town to have kids like these representing us.
Smile guys!
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For only the second time since we’ve been married – the first was the summer of 1993 when Laura was carrying Pad and we had just moved to Edmonton – I won’t be standing ankle deep in the sand this summer on North Bay beach in Ingonish.
That cold reality set in over the last couple of weeks and was finally nailed into place on the weekend.
Pad’s training and on-ice schedule this summer is such that as much as we all want to go to Nova Scotia, everything he has been working for more or less comes together in mid-to-late August.
So Laura and Chris will head east (again) with me and Pad staying here (again) and I will continue to watch him and his friends chase their dreams.
Serious conversations were held and family meetings convened. The two things we all could agree on was that logically, it made no sense for him to stop working out on the cusp of training camps; and second, that it would be a poor use of money to try and pop out east and then come back.
As a 1993, he has a full year of midget left if he wants it. But there are several opportunities to try out for junior A – tier two as it’s known – and there’s another opportunity beyond that.
But there’s a lot of work involved with all of it and every day I see him and a bunch of other 1993s sweating it out at BTNL or on the ice. To take time off would be to give someone else an edge, I guess.
I am excited for him and all those guys fighting to get ahead. As I’ve said before, it’s hard to imagine how hard they work.
In 1997, when he was four, it was my job to strap him into a car seat at drive him to Timbits hockey in Ottawa when it was still dark out. I still get excited watching him hit the ice.
And I’m still happy to drive.
Ingonish will just have to get by without me for a summer, and, vice versa.
July 16, 2010
I was at Glen Abbey last night watching the midget 2 Hawks play Mississauga (why do I always have to watch Mississauga?) in what was generally a fairly lamentable excuse for a lacrosse game.
Low scoring and absent of much energy on either bench, the game seemed a victim of the environment – hot, sticky, humid conditions such that admittedly the boys on both sides could be excused for perhaps forgetting their “A” games.
Heading into the final five minutes the visitors held a 3-1 lead that frankly felt like it was 10-1. It wasn’t so much the dominance of one team over the other; it just felt like the home side wasn’t interested.
Then, a game changer.
Mississauga was assessed a four-minute penalty for a hit from behind along the boards (on a call by a tall, young ref of my acquaintance) and suddenly the Hawks came to life. They scored quickly on the powerplay to narrow the deficit to a single goal, and then with plenty of time left in the penalty they added another to tie the score.
With less than two minutes to go, they took the lead and that was that.
The coach of the team is a former coach of Pad’s and we chatted in parking lot on the way to the car.
While I wouldn’t generally counsel a team to wait until the final three minutes to start playing, it seemed to work in this case, I said.
He just smiled and shook his head.
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The folks at MOHA have done some nice work to pull together a web site marking the 50th anniversary of one of Canada’s largest minor hockey associations.
I asked the question last fall about what the board might plan to mark the occasion and the web site is a pretty good stroll down memory lane. Well done.
As with anything in a volunteer-driven organization it’s only as good as the contributions from its members, but MOHA deserves some credit.
More importantly, I think, they’ve created a focal point for people to send contributions going forward so that the history of the organization can be preserved and enjoyed.
The photo galleries, especially the older stuff, is great to look at. Those haircuts . . .
You can visit the new anniversary site here.
It would be nice if a link to the site could be given some prominence on the MOHA home page.
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Long-time rep ice scheduler, director, and, um, perennially sweet voice on the other end of the phone, MOHA’s Helen Ford was recently honoured at the Ontario Hockey Federation’s AGM with the OHF Minor Hockey Award for significant administrative contribution to minor hockey.
Helen’s contributions to MOHA, the Tri County Hockey League and minor hockey in southern Ontario have been massive.
And if you fail to call in a score during MOHA playdowns, she will kill you.
Go to this page and scroll down to find Helen’s story and her picture.
Congratualtions.
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If you were sitting on a gold mine, what would you do?
That might be regarded as what we call a high-quality problem. But it’s apparently the true story of a man in rural Quebec who refuses to move out or sell his humble home.
If you read the story you get the impression that the gentleman is unique.
Read more here.
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As you head into the weekend, something light and funny
Drive safely – maybe find a cool rink to spend part of your weekend in, and maybe sit with me so I’ll have someone to talk to – or at least, mumble at.
This video below is one of the most amazing card tricks you’ll ever see.
If pressed for time, fast forward to about 1:45 of the clip, that’s when the trick starts. It only takes about two minutes and besides, you boss is off today, right?
Laugh. Enjoy the weekend. Hug the kids!
July 15, 2010
One advantage to my older kid’s summer training regime is that his schedule often provides me with cool places to hide from the heat and humidity. Not cool as in trendy.
Cool as in, the environment of a meat locker.
The last two evenings he had two-hour evening sessions at a rink in Burlington and an old dad could sit in the stands in a suit jacket and be comfortable. Not chilly or cold, just comfortable.
As opposed to January, when you have to dress like your getting ready to cross the polar ice cap if you plan on sitting in a rink for two hours.
Now, the drive west on the QEW to get him there on time is another matter entirely.
Summer in the city, right?
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The English language is an amazing thing. When it intersects with evolving society and technology, it can overwhelm.
A seemingly simple sentence today would have been cause for the men with the coats with the really long sleeves to come pick you up just a few short years ago.
Take this example:
“Chris IM’d me on Facebook last night to say that he got the red circle of death on his xBox and wondered if he should Tweet or text to find out if there’s a fix, but in the meantime he’s gonna Google the problem and check the iTunes store for an app.”
That sentence would actually bring both my parents to a dead stop even today. They’re familiar with the terms, but not all of the different meanings.
I’ve said here before that Chris looks at me like I was raised on a Mennonite farm when I tell him there was no Internet when I was his age. Internet – heck, he thinks any place that doesn’t have wireless broadband probably has outhouses for toilets, too.
Anyway, I thought about technology and language when I overheard someone use the ubiquitous Apple iPhone phrase – “There’s an app for that.”
As almost everyone knows, an “app” is an application or program that you can download to your phone or Blackberry to do something useful – calculate a tip at a restaurant – or useless – replicate the cowbell sound when you shake your iPhone while watching the winter Olympics.
There are literally hundreds of thousands of apps and more – hundreds more – are created every day.
I have a Blackberry and my apps are few. I have Facebook and Twitter. Plus I have the very excellent Canadian Press Mobile News app. I have The Score sports results app – which is perhaps the best sports app I’ve yet seen (and it’s free.) I have Google Maps and the Google Mobile app, and . . . that’s it.
I use the CP news app a lot to read real-time news whether I’m commuting or sitting in a rink or standing in the kitchen pretending to listen to Laura.
I use the Score app a lot in the evenings. Golf leader boards, baseball and World Cup scores, NHL during the season. It’s wonderful. Who scored, when, etc etc.
The mobile phone companies and the service providers are happy to sell cheaply or give away these apps because they like happy customers, and they REALLY like happy customers who will consume bandwidth and make their bills go up. Use more apps, use more bandwidth, pay more money.
All of which is a windy way to say that I spotted on the New York Times mobile site a story on apps that don’t exist, but might be useful.
And since it was spotted on mobile, and since I have largely ignored the Facebook corner of the soon-to-be-sprawling Teamoakville empire, I’m going to post the link to the story there.
I encourage you to join the Teamoakville Facebook page, where we’ll soon feature a contest where you could win a 1980 Chrysler Cordoba, with seats made of luxurious Corinthian leather. (Note from legal counsel: There is no car, there will be no contest.)
Click here to go to the Teamoakville Facebook group!
There’s an app for that!
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There’s much hand-wringing going on in the wake of the G20 here a couple of weeks ago and the sometimes uneven performance of the local constabulary. One day taking forever to respond as police cars burned in the street, the next day arresting peaceful protesters for exercising their constitutionally protected right to assemble and protest.
One poor cop is all over Youtube for threatening to arrest a young lady for blowing soap bubbles at the police line.
As presented, the officer in question looks like he’s going a bit over the top. The woman cop next to him initially looks a little amused by it all. And then he goes all Robocop and it gets progressively uglier.
And while it’s an easy temptation to say the cop overreacted, consider the context, too. It was hot. It was tense. The police had been out there for hours. And some protester is blowing soap bubbles in your face. How long do you expect to do that before pissing someone off? (The correct answer is, not very long.)
Again, I’m happy to let Facebook be the host for this one. But I’m curious who you think acted poorly. Post your comment on the page.
And join the group!! Win a 1980 Chrysler Cordoba, with seats made of luxurious Corinthian leather! (Note from legal counsel: There is no car, there will be no contest.)
July 13, 2010
One the things I try to do when playing Mr Mom – home alone with one or both the boys – is to not let the laundry pile up.
One reason is simple practicality – with Pad skating or working out or both every day, you really don’t want to let the Under Armour have much time to get too funky.
It smells bad enough and if left to sit for even a short duration, well, you get the idea.
The hockey gear is bad enough, right.
So, the boys know the drill: as soon as your unpack your bag and hang up your gear, the washable stuff goes right in the machine.
Easy enough and not even I can screw it up.
One thing I’m not big on, however, is checking pockets before dumping clothes in the laundry.
So anyway . . .
Regular readers know that Pad has a peanut allergy and he never goes out without his Epipens – important things that in an emergency inject adrenalin into the system and buy time while you dial 9-1-1.
Apparently you’re not supposed to wash them in a machine, or so my wife tells me.
On the one hand, Pad should have taken them out of the pocket of his shorts before throwing the clothes into the dirty laundry pile.
On the other hand . . . I guess I should have checked the pockets.
But they do clean up nicely. We have no way of knowing if the pens were damaged in the wash but it’s not really one of those things you want to take a chance on.
The pens cost north of $100 each and had to be replaced immediately.
D’oh.
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There are many great spectacles on the planet that I would like to witness or take part in. The running of the bulls is not one of them. I mention this only because a Canadian was among those injured in Pamplona this week, which you can read about here.
I've seen the running of the hockey dads when it's last call at a hotel bar during a February tournament in a frozen town. That's scary enough for me.
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The baseball all-star game goes tonight in Anaheim, on the same day the George Steinbrenner died.
There aren’t many figures in sport over the last 40 years or so who have had as much influence and created as much controversy as the man know as The Boss.
He changed baseball, and perhaps professional sports, forever, while overseeing the creation of seven World Series champions – some because of him, some in spite of him.
Read more here.
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We watched bits and pieces of the home run derby last night and with yet more hockey tonight I expect that’s about how much we’ll see of the all-star game too, not that it matters.
The evenings right now are so warm and pleasant it’s hard to justify sitting inside.
July 12, 2010
We now resume regular programming.
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After a mostly sweltering week off I’m back on the train this morning. Laura and Chris returned last night from Nova Scotia where there was a lot of time spent in the pool and bay and eating lobsters and enjoying a Nova Scotia summer.
On Friday night I got to feeling guilty about not having attempted to build the patio steps on the backyard patio that was completed on July 4, 2009. More than a year has gone by and the temporary concrete monstrosities that have served as a step were starting to look permanent.
So I hauled my butt outside and did some measurements and confirmed the numbers and then drove to RONA. I knew I needed six-by-six lumber and I knew handling and cutting it would be as much fun as black fly season. And I was right.
Both Home Depot and RONA told me they couldn’t help me cut the timbers. I had the measurements. I just don’t have a power saw big enough to cut a six-inch piece of wood.
Neither, apparently, do they.
You know Home Depot’s slogan – “You can do it. We can help.”
Well, not in this case. They agreed I could do it. But they weren’t going to help and RONA said the same thing. This news deflated and dumbfounded me somewhat. I mean if Home Depot can’t cut a piece of wood, what the hell am I supposed to do?
Fine.
I loaded up a 10-foot length and an eight-foot length, seven 35 KG bags of screenings, a 33 kilogram bag of patio sand, and enough brackets, angle iron, wood screws and concrete screws to sink a cruise ship, and then headed home to prepare for my candidacy as Canada’s Worst Handyman.
I unloaded the works of it into the garage, sat looking at it feeling a bit overwhelmed, and then went and had a beer.
I woke up at about 5:30a Saturday morning and couldn’t get back to sleep, with the lumber taunting me.
So I got up, made some toast and spent about 30 minutes reviewing all of my measurements six more times.
Finally I went into the garage to tackle it.
A word or two about six-by-six lumber. It’s not six-by-six. It’s more like 5.5-by5.5. It’s a large, heavy, ill-tempered and ornery thing, and even worse when it has been sitting in an open lumber yard exposed to torrential rain like we had Friday.
I wrestled the 10-foot length onto the Workmate and put the other end over a garbage can.
Pad was sleeping peacefully.
And then after carefully measuring my cuts on all four sides I started to manually slice into the thing with a 26-inch bow saw, which I own for the heretofore sole happy purpose of cutting down Christmas trees.
This was a less festive occasion.
The first couple of lengths – 53-inch pieces for the front of the step boxes that would contain paving stones – went pretty well. It took about seven or eight minutes to do each cut, but I managed.
Cutting up the eight-foot length was another matter altogether.
Soaked from the rain, the wood seized up the saw interminably and if I wasn’t close to tears, I was finding new and creative ways to join the Creator’s name with slang expressions for aberrant sexual conduct. If there had been a gallery, I’m sure my vocabulary would have earned a golf clap.
I actually stopped at one point, dripping with sweat and went in the house and went on the Internet to look for any advice on manually cutting a six-by-six piece of lumber.
Nothing. Apparently only idiots do this sort of thing. (Insert sound of crickets chirping.)
The break apparently helped because when I went back out I managed to finish the cut, soaked with sweat but not beaten.
Pad was sleeping peacefully.
In terms of this story, the heavy lifting was now done with the evil timbers reduced to mere shadows of their former glory.
From there, it was more or less a heavy, Ikea-like exercise with me following my own instructions, which thankfully worked out fairly well.
The old concrete steps have been moved to the side of the house and, dear reader, they are now on offer – free to a good home if your want them for a cottage or perhaps a boat anchor, or to lace around the neck of a work colleague you wish to take boating. Actually, I don’t care if it’s a good home. They’re free to drug dealers, murderers or upstanding community members alike. I’m thinking of putting them out front with a bicycle chain on them overnight. For sure, they’d be gone by morning.
By Saturday evening I was stiffening up all over – back, legs, arms, shoulders. Despite going to the gym five times a week, I’m a rather pathetic physical specimen (this in turn is leading me to think that the gym is a waste of time and a sedentary life on the chicken-wings-and-nachos-diet works just fine.)
But, I’m nonetheless a rather pathetic physical specimen with new patio steps, and that’s good enough for me.
You can review the step-by-step (pun intended) evidence of how Laura finally got her new patio steps here.
Pad eventually awoke – perhaps roused by the sound of me drilling angle iron onto the foundation, or perhaps awoken by an innate need to see if I was alive. A curious neighbour held vigil over the proceedings for most of the morning, no doubt phone in hand, with the digits 9-1-1 already punched in, finger poised to hit SEND.
Red Green once said that if a man’s not handsome then he’d better be handy. To be neither is a burden I can barely stand, but I have other talents (I‘m available for contracting swearing and cussing assignments, contact me at the usual address.)
Project done, in about five and half hours.
Plus a year and six days, which is record speed by my standards.
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Apparently a soccer game of some note was played Sunday. I have great trouble mustering excitement over a game I don’t otherwise watch featuring athletes I don’t know or recognize.
But I will say this – have you ever noticed that no matter who wins a game on a particular day, a local TV station will report that Toronto’s Little Brazil or Little Paraguay or Little Ghana neighbourhood poured into the streets (they never walk or run, they always pour) to celebrate the victory?
I didn’t even know about Little Uruguay. I need to get out more.
But hey, with steps like this, why would I?
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This is starting to sound like a broken record -- the Oakville A's minor mosquito AAA baseball team went 5-0 on the weekend at the OMBA Oakville A's Minor Mosquito tournament. The team is now three for three in tournament play this season with a 16-0 record in those tourneys.
The boys go stateside in two weeks to take on some US competition. Good luck there!
Pictured above are:
Back row (players)
Ethan Hammond, Evan McIntyre, Tyler
Sagl, Luke Raczywolski, Eric Cerantola, Carter Pauley
Kneeling
Matthew Stone, Andrew MacGrandle, Paul
Costin, Tanner Elson, Jordan Gamble, Luke Seidel
Coaches top row;
John Raczywolski, Ryan Seidel, Allen
Elson, Richard Gamble and Drew Hammond
July 9, 2010
Let's just say it was too hot to blog, so I didn't. But I'm still around.
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I was at Glen Abbey on Wednesday night to watch the midget 1 Hawks play Mississauga -- Pad was reffing so I figured why not. Lots of folks I know were there and it was a fun night as the Hawks (apparently enduring a bit of a challenging summer) emerged with a solid 7-1.
I sat between Neeb and Maguire who took turns trying to be funnier than me. It was hopeless.
It was very, very hot.
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I'm supposed to be building a new back step for the patio but I haven't yet. Again, let's just blame the heat. Laura and Chris return home on Sunday night and I'm not liking the odds of me having the step done by then. We'll see.
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My week has largely been spent ferrying Pad to hockey camp and training at BTNL -- actually, he does all the driving but he needs me to be in the car while he drives
We went to see the movie Grown Ups on Thursday and as you might expect in a film with Adam Sandler, Chris Rock, David Spade, Rob Schneider and Kevin James, there were a lot of funny moments.
It's sort of a Big Chill thing -- friends from grade school reuniting for a coach's funeral, and the rich guy rents a big old house on a lake for everyone to use for the weekend. Hilarity ensues in close quarters.
Other than a little language and the usual leering at women in bathing suits, it's suitable for most audiences.
My guy Chris would love it.
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One of the best parts of being a dad and driver is meeting other kids. Today, Pad and three other guys needed a drive from Ice2Ice (where they were working out on the new Strong Hockey artificial ice service) to BTNL for afternoon torture. I didn't know any of the three, but by the time we got to BTNL I felt like I wanted to call each of their parents and tell them what great kids they have.
Each shook my hand and introduced himself, looked me square in the eyes and called me sir (I told them not to do that.) They chattered like magpies and asked smart questions. In the vernacular of hockey, they were all 94s.
Rep hockey players don't have nationalities or home towns. They have a year.
"Hi. This is my son Patrick. He's a 93. He has a brother Chris -- he's a 96."
One thing a lot of kids get out of participating in rep sports is a confidence and sense of how to conduct themselves when meeting new people. Because they travel a lot and meet new people all the time.
Not everyone gets to play junior or NCAA or pro. But if the rep experience turns out kids like that, I have a lot of confidence in this generation. Nice boys.
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Part of the conversation was around two Europeans who are training in this camp. I asked the boys who were the guys in the funky pants -- hockey pants adorned with advertising, a la the Spengler Cup.
One of the boys in the back said "Oh, those guys are Europeans here to train."
Then came the best line of the short drive.
"They sure can skate and they seem like good guys. But I don't understand a thing they say."
As Steve Martin said of Europeans, "it's like they have a different word for everything."
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One of my favourite Oakville real estate agents and a loyal blog reader is having a bad week. First she lost her Blackberry and hadn't backed up the nearly 1,000 contacts on the thing (which she now knows is a bad idea.) And last night her car was broken into.
I hope the karma changes for her -- soon!
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Here's hoping you all spend your weekend with people who understand you.
Drive carefully and watch out for new drivers.
Hug the kids!
July 6, 2010
The word last night that Bob Probert collapsed and died while boating with his family was a bit of a stunner.
Probert, 45, had a reputation for living hard and playing hard – and whether he had tamed any of his personal demons in recent years, I have no idea.
But his name was a synonym for toughness in the NHL over 15 seasons. He was respected and feared for his punishing physical play. But he also could actually put the puck in the net sometimes too, scoring 29 goals in 1987-88 and he scored 163 times in his career.
But it would not have mattered if Probert scored 50 goals in consecutive seasons. He was a brawler in an era of hockey where every team carried a couple of tough guys and among his peers in that category he was Gretzky.
He played for only two teams in his career – Detroit and Chicago – but he will forever be remembered as a Red Wing.
He leaves a wife and four kids.
Click here to read more and click here to read a good overview of his career. Click below to see five great Probert fights.
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As Charles Manson said to his prison guard: Am I crazy, or is hot in here?
Yes, you’re crazy but it is also actually hot.
Really hot. Stupid hot, as Pad called it yesterday as he finished working out at BTNL.
When I was making breakfast for the big guy yesterday, the temperature topped 30 degrees at 10:18a. At 9p last night, it was still slightly over 30.
We have a funky digital weather station in our yard and the thing is amazingly accurate. It gives you the real temperature – not the “in the sun” reading – and when it tells you it’s going to rain, well, it is going to rain.
I took this pic of the weather station monitor in the kitchen yesterday at about 3:30p yesterday afternoon.
This is hot. 36.4 -- and note the 0.0 wind speed.
So, at least there was no wind chill!
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While we wait to get Pad signed up for professional driver training he’s been doing the stuff kids and parents do once a beginner’s permit is in hand.
We drove around an empty parking lot so he could get the feel of a car – how hard to push on the brake, how much pressure to apply to the accelerator, the importance of setting your mirrors, how to do a shoulder check, etc. All in the safety of paved, empty acreage.
We since moved on to actual street driving. First quiet residential streets, and then gradually busier routes.
Yesterday he drove from our place to BTNL – down Dorval to Speers, Speers to Cornwall, and then back again after his workout. That’s probably some of the busiest traffic in town and he handled it fine.
Last night he drove to the Beer Store – to return empty wine bottles. It was nice to have someone do the lifting.
And from there we went to buy gas – even though I paid, I wanted him to know how to pay for it! – and then we went through the car wash, all with him at the wheel.
So far, so good.
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An interesting development in the news business over at Yahoo!, where smart propeller-head types are using digital data to shape the way they cover national affairs, politics and the media.
A little inside baseball for you – for decades, news coverage has been assigned the old fashioned way, using experienced editors to assign reporters to cover events and issues deemed to be newsworthy.
Some of it is self evident – rioters burning police cars in the streets during the G20 is newsworthy.
Some of it is not, and that’s where “news judgment” comes into play. An experienced hand makes the call on whether it’s really worth a reporter’s time and our money to cover the mayor’s pig roast in Tiny, Ontario. (We’ll pass, thanks.)
Part of the beauty of the way our company works is that most newspapers, radio stations and TV stations happily share their routine news with us. So while we might not send a reporter to Tiny, we can still get the story later if something newsworthy happened – say, the Queen showed up unannounced (which, BTW, would never, ever, never ever happen ever. Royal visits don’t work that way.)
In the old days you’d use non-scientific metrics to see if you were getting it right – feedback from editors and news directors of our clients and customers, reading their papers and seeing how they played the news, listening to and watching broadcasts.
More recently we’re becoming more and more able to see, in real terms and virtually in real time, which stories attract the most traffic online.
That’s useful in a number of ways. It helps inform our decisions on coverage, but it doesn’t entirely drive those decisions. It tells us what content is more valuable to the people buying it, and it tells them how much to charge advertisers for a place on a page.
But it’s never black and white.
If the prime minister announced tomorrow that he was launching a series of 25 national town hall meetings on official bilingualism, we know that most of you would say “that’s enough to bore me to death.”
But it’s also important and we can’t ignore it as part of the national affairs agenda of the country.
We know you’d rather read about Jessica Simpson’s latest weight loss program or the NHL free agent signings, but you’re going to get official bilingualism too. Whether you read it or not is up to you!
Anyway, what Yahoo is experimenting with is really another tool in the arsenal of planning and executing news coverage, which is a critical part of any democratic society and that’s what makes it interesting to me.
Read more here.
July 5, 2010
Blog warning – with my spouse and younger son in the Maritimes and me burning off some 1997 accumulated holiday time that was never used, blogging this week is expected to be inconsistent and untimely.
Sometimes I’ll be here in the morning. Sometimes in the evening. So, if you’re really bored check in later and I may have posted if I didn’t earlier.
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Ontario really is a beautiful province. It’s a big, sprawling place and I’ve only really seen corners of it, but when I get the chance to explore it never ceases to amaze me.
Nova Scotia – my home – is geographically much, much smaller so it’s easier to see the remarkable different faces that gem offers. Cape Breton Highlands is radically different from the Margaree Valley. The South Shore and Eastern Shore look nothing alike. The Halifax region, the Annapolis Valley, Bay of Fundy, and Yarmouth county. All different.
This past weekend I had to drive up to Tiny Township on Georgian Bay to retrieve Patrick and while I’ve been to Wasaga and Collingwood and Midland, this view of the spectacular Huronia region was new to me.
The temperature on Saturday pushed 34, the sky was, as we say in our house, Vacation Blue. It was a perfect summer day.
I think Canadians appreciate summer in ways that many other folks don’t. We don’t get a lot of summer and every hour is a gift.
The mayor of Tiny was hosting the annual pig roast on Sunday and I was tempted to drive back. But imagining the traffic on the 400 coming home chased that notion away.
One thing I miss about not having Pad in rep lacrosse this summer is the road trips to places like Midland where it seemed there was always a community BBQ going somewhere and you got to have a nice meal and meet some local folks.
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Much of my week is going to be spent ferrying Pad to hockey camp and dryland workouts. While he does that, I’ll continue to slowly bang away at Project Fat Dad, which now stands at 16 pounds and . . . sort of holding.
When I picked up Pad on Saturday, I was offered BBQ tenderloin, BBQ corn, Caesar salad, rice . . . you get the idea. I didn’t want to be rude.
Laura and I have agreed the next six weeks will be considered a success if we can hold the gains of the last three months and then resume the Project in earnest after Labour Day.
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Pad and I bought him new skates yesterday.
The Grafs he has been wearing for several seasons still fit his foot, but the changes in his legs and ankle structure as he has sprouted to 6-4 and nearly 200 pounds means the boots now hurt. So off we went.
After three stops we ended at Pro Hockey Life, which is probably where we should have started.
He got a new high-end pair of Bauers that literally cost almost as much as my first car.
But when you spend as much time in skates as he does at the level he does – games, practices, reffing – then you had better be comfortable.
Welcome to the family, the new Bauer X60.
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A final shout out of congratulations to our friend Michael Santangeli, who made the Team Ontario U17 rugby squad in the past week.
Michael was a fixture on Pad’s hockey teams in the last couple years of house league hockey and then Mike took his act to the GTHL while Pad played with the Rangers.
Mike gave up hockey for rugby and, well, it looks like it was a pretty good call.
As I’ve said here before, for every kid who achieves something like this there’s an untold story of the work behind the success. In this case, I know how hard Mike worked. He earned this the old fashioned way, sweating in a gym and on fields when the only person to impress is yourself.
Well done, Mike, and good luck.
July 2, 2010
A late and brief posting today. Unlike most of you I worked a good chunk of Canada Day, which is what happens when your family bails out on you.
Overall it was a necessary evil I’m afraid, but I did manage to squeeze in a trip to the gym in between conference calls. And I’m in the office today too, but it’s all fairly painless.
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Chris and Laura are having a grand time in Cape Breton, where Chris is subsisting on the usual diet of his grandmother’s chocolate chip cookies and Laura is helping her dad perfect the art of poolside/seaside gin-and-tonic consumption.
Pad meanwhile is marvelling at Georgian Bay, and I’m marvelling at lawyers who work on stat holidays.
I had a couple of very cold beers last night and a feed of BBQ chicken with a whole wheat pasta side dish, and I made it myself – no emergency call to Swiss Chalet.
Yet.
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I saw some of the Queen’s visit to Parliament Hill yesterday, which put me in mind of when we were in Ottawa – the first time with no kids, the second time with toddling boys. Every Canadian should experience Canada Day in Ottawa at least once. It is wonderfully special, the epicentre of Canadian patriotism for a day.
When I was reflecting last week on the demise of the Meech Lake accord in 1990, I had forgotten one element of that period that slipped my mind completely until I was watching the concert on the hill last night.
Canada Day 1990 was fraught with Quebec separatist tension – the Bloc Quebecois had just formed, Mulroney and Lucien Bouchard commenced a feud that continues unabated, and there was a growing sense of frustration and resignation that national unity questions would consume the country.
We had only been in Ottawa six months on Canada Day 1990, so we went downtown for the concert on the hill that night which featured among others, Murray McLaughlin.
Setting aside that I once paid to see him perform in Halifax, fighting my way through a blizzard to get to a downtown club for the show, whereupon he took the stage, played the first two lines of “The Farmer’s Song” and then declared he was too drunk to continue and walked off, I still liked the guy.
And on the steamy night of July 1, 1990, he played the finale on Parliament Hill and sang what was then a relatively new tune, but which has since become a bit of an anthem at his shows, and the title of the tune and tens of thousands of people singing along to the chorus made me feel some hope for the country in those uncertain hours. It was weirdly appropriate to the times.
Click below to see and hear a studio version of McLaughlin performing “Let The Good Guys Win.”
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The other thing that occurred to me watching and reading coverage of the Queen this week is that I’m getting old, even if the 84-year-old monarch and Queen of Canada herself seems ageless.
The reason that bit of obvious news dawned on me was her review of the Canadian navy earlier this week as the force marked its 100th anniversary.
It was 25 years ago in Halifax when I covered the visit of Prince Andrew, who arrived to take part in celebrations marking the 75th anniversary of the navy.
On that assignment I met Andrew – said by some to be the Queen’s favourite – and he was more candid and off-the-cuff than I expected when we chatted at a small reception and I liked his candour. Protocol was that reporters were not to report on their conversations with the royals, which typically was fairly easy to do in that they almost never said anything interesting. I wanted to ask about the Falklands War and Koo Stark but there was little time and given his line of work he wasn't likely a kiss-and-tell sort anyway.
As David Letterman would call it, a brush with greatness. I have met Prince Charles and Prince Edward, too, and covered Diana, sadly from a distance.
(But I am certain she winked at me. Everyone who ever covered one of her tours would say the same thing.)
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Have a great weekend, it’s going to be a scorcher.
Drive safely. Watch out for the kids on your street. They’re everywhere now.
And hug your own kids!